Director of Retention

Sequencing

3d • Remote

About The Position

Sequencing is hiring its first dedicated Director of Retention to own subscription retention, renewals, and recurring revenue. The role sets the retention strategy and is accountable for delivering results across product, engineering, growth, customer support, bioinformatics, and finance. It is a hands-on operating role: the Director analyzes cohort, payment, and cancellation data, identifies causes of churn, implements direct fixes, partners with engineering and design on larger changes, and measures initiatives against holdout groups. AI is expected to be central to the work, including building analyses, agents, and automations and helping raise the company’s standard for AI use.

The position sits on the product team and reports to the CEO until a Head of Product & Customer Experience is hired, after which it reports to that role. The Director has a defined engineering allocation for retention work and direct control of Stripe billing and subscription tooling and account and billing messaging in the lifecycle platform. The role works particularly closely with lifecycle marketing on the growth team.

The Director will define retention targets and plans, own and report key retention metrics, investigate why members leave, lead the retention roadmap across web, coaching, and the AI-native app, optimize subscription plans and pricing, and deliver initiatives from specification through launch and measurement. Initial success expectations include diagnosing the causes of member departures and their financial impact, shipping and measuring initial changes against a holdout, and agreeing on a 12-month plan and its expected revenue impact with leadership and finance.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience in direct-to-consumer subscription businesses, in product or growth, with direct ownership of a retention, renewal, or recurring-revenue target.
• Demonstrated, measurable improvement in retention, churn, or lifetime value, supported by results, methodology, and holdout measurement.
• Strong product fundamentals, including writing clear specifications, prioritizing roadmaps by business impact, delivering with engineering and design through launch, and designing, interpreting, and acting on experiments.
• Fluency in subscription economics, including cohorts, churn, LTV, payback, pricing, and packaging.
• Ability to independently use SQL and build cohort, survival, and payment-failure analyses from a data warehouse and Stripe.
• Hands-on knowledge of retention tools and tactics, including dunning and retries, card updater, cancellation and win-back flows, pause and downgrade paths, trial design, and lifecycle triggers across email, push, and in-app.
• Cross-functional leadership skills, including setting strategy, securing engineering and design capacity, holding teams to shared goals, and communicating clearly and concisely with executives.
• Strong practical use of AI for analyses, agents, and automations, including having built something real with AI that can be demonstrated in an interview.

Nice To Haves

• Startup experience, especially building a retention function from scratch.
• Experience with a trial-to-paid model in which the trial begins before the core value is delivered, such as a lab or hardware product with a processing wait.
• Experience in healthtech, consumer wellness, genomics, or another regulated consumer category.
• Experience with a business pairing a physical product with a digital subscription, such as a kit and an app or reports.
• Experience with pricing and packaging, including plan design, trials, bundles, and upgrade and downgrade paths.
• Experience with Stripe, Snowflake, Amplitude or Heap, and lifecycle platforms such as Blueshift, Braze, Iterable, or Klaviyo.
• Mobile app engagement and retention experience.

Responsibilities

• Set targets for subscription retention, renewals, and recurring revenue, and develop a plan that distinguishes initiatives with 90-day payback from those that compound over 12 months.
• Own cohort retention, trial-to-paid conversion, voluntary and involuntary churn, MRR, and LTV metrics; report monthly to leadership with holdout-based results and a financial case for each initiative.
• Investigate why members leave using warehouse and Stripe data, cancellation reasons, support tickets, and interviews; convert findings into member-focused fixes.
• Own the retention product roadmap across web, coaching, and the AI-native app, covering trial conversion, onboarding, results delivery, subscription management, payment recovery, renewals, upgrades, cancellation, and win-back flows.
• Optimize subscription plans, structure, and pricing in collaboration with finance on renewal economics and growth on offers and promotions.
• Run delivery end to end by writing specifications, prioritizing with engineering and design, running experiments, and tracking releases through launch and measurement.
• Align engineering, growth, customer support, data, and finance around shared retention goals, and provide lifecycle marketing with goals, segments, and triggers for its programs.
• Build and use AI analyses, agents, and automations as part of day-to-day work and help raise the company’s AI capabilities.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Paid time off.
• Annual paid volunteer time off during normal business hours.
• Fully remote work, with equipment provided and internet and cell reimbursements.
• Parental bonding leave.
• Private, confidential clinical-grade whole genome sequencing for the employee and immediate family.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed